Business Week: Facebook may be embroiled in a new round of patent wars

Lead: The latest issue of the print edition of the US Business Week says that while the current intensifying technology patent war has yet to spill over to emerging internet companies such as Facebook and Twitter, this may change. The following is the full text of the article: conflict reappearance Paul Marritz (Paul Maritz) witnessed many patent conflicts. The VMware CEO worked for 14 years at Microsoft, mainly in the 90 's. At that time, the company was rapidly expanding its dominance and posing a threat to the old technology giants. He remembers having visited Hewlett-Packard, Dec and other giants many times to show respect and to sign licensing agreements with these companies, allowing Microsoft to use their key intellectual property to avoid a prolonged legal battle. "We have to do this," Marritz said. " "Now he sees the technology industry facing a similar situation. So far, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, LinkedIn and other Silicon Valley social-media stars have not been embroiled in a growing patent war-the core of this patent war is mobile devices. But Marritz said: "When the pattern changes and there are new entrants into an area, it will lead to instability." "Legal experts and tech executives believe there will be more patent conflicts in the future." Old technology companies, such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, have a rich patent portfolio that covers many of the Internet's core technologies, especially in the fields of database and file management. "A new generation of companies, such as Google, Facebook and LinkedIn, will end up with established companies. "There has been a similar situation in the technology industry before," said Timothy D. Casey Timothy Kessi, co-founder of SilverSky, a former Apple patent lawyer, intellectual property and business strategy consultancy. "Part of the risk of a new generation of patent portfolio companies is their weak patent portfolio." Facebook currently has only 12 patents, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and the patent portfolio for Twitter, Zynga, LinkedIn and Groupon is between 0 and 2. That leaves them in the same position as Google did earlier this year, when Google had far fewer mobile patents than its rivals.　　According to the study by MDB Capital Group, the US investment bank, the total number of mobile-related patents that Google applied for or obtained in the early August was only 307, Rim was 3134, Nokia was 2655 and Microsoft was 2594. This relatively weak position also prompted Google to spend 12.5 billion of dollars on August 15 to buy Motorola Mobile, which is Google's largest ever mergers and acquisitions. It is also possible that emerging network companies will eventually be able to consolidate their position through similar measures. "If you want to gain a foothold in the industry, it's best to have defensive measures."　　"Marritz said. Data centeris an area where conflict can occur. Oracle, IBM and Microsoft have spent decades applying for a large number of technology patents related to file management and information storage. But companies such as Facebook and Twitter have not paid to buy the Giants ' products, but have used free open-source software. For example, these enterprises use a large number of database programs such as MySQL and Cassandra and Hadoop file management system. These internet companies often even develop open source applications and open them up to the public, thus impacting the most lucrative businesses of established businesses.　　But the software has borrowed from the experience of previous products, at least conceptually. Innovation focus so far, database patent holders such as Oracle and IBM have not had much incentive to sue open source products.　　The biggest clients of these companies include Wall Street investment banks and some retailers, but these customers also use Open-source software, so the patent war will create unease. But this does not apply to their relationship with the internet giants. Jonathan Schwartz, former CEO of Sun, said a new generation of Internet companies was proud of Jonathan Schwarz technology that did not buy old Silicon Valley companies. "To a certain extent, they are likely to be targets of litigation," he said. "he said. IBM, Oracle and Microsoft declined to comment. And the banner of Open source has not made Google out of many difficulties.　　The mobile operating system has become the core of recent technology patent lawsuits, and Apple, Microsoft and Oracle have launched lawsuits against them. The rise of cloud computing complicates the problem. Consumer companies such as Amazon and Google are now starting to offer Web services to corporate users, invading the territory of companies such as Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. As data centers become the focus of innovation, many new conflicts may also arise. For example, Google has a lot of patents on how to store and analyze data from hundreds of thousands of of servers. In July this year, Google bought more than 1000 IBM patents with an amount of money that was not clear – many of them related to key data center innovations. Google has published some of the results in the database field, and Facebook and other companies have developed their own key data center technologies based on this information. "Will Google do it now?" Marritz asked.　　Both Google and Facebook declined to comment. The dispute still lingers in the US law firm DLA Piper Intellectual property lawyer Mark Ladecrive (Mark F.radcliffe) doubts that emerging companies will be embroiled in a new data center patent war. He argues that there are good reasons why the patent wars are currently confined to the mobile sector. "You can take the phone apart and say someone has infringed it." But for the data center, you don't know the details and it's hard to judge the amount of the claim based on too much guesswork. "In addition, many open-source products used by emerging internet companies--including Oepnstack and HadooSoftware such as P, which is an important technology in the field of cloud computing and data analysis, draws on many ideas from different inventors, and each company customizes it and adds more content to its core technology base. "Developing these products requires a strong collaborative environment." "Radcliffe said. But he added: "In all of us for the product ' building blocks ', and did not sign a responsibility." Kathy points out that when he was at Apple in the late 80, the company had only one patent. However, Apple has now developed more patents and has signed a number of cross licensing agreements. The internet, he argues, could also follow the same path, as they all regard patents as "policies" – or "revenue streams" as established businesses call them. (Ding Macro)